Enterprise Mobility and Security – The easy way as Excalibur rises from the ashes.

On Friday (4/11/16) I ceased to be a full time employee working for Microsoft UK Ltd. In most circumstances I would have found this a rather disconcerting, even sad day. But NO!

One thing never changes at Microsoft and that is the speed of change! Rapid hardly describes it. The department I worked for changed their focus in July and I have been looking around for my next role either in or out of Microsoft.

The ideal opportunity arose, to deliver IT Camps and other training and event services to Microsoft as a vendor and to carry on my Microsoft Training and consultancy business which had to stop when I joined full time. And training is my real passion.

Having made the decision, resigned and come up with a mutually convenient date for this to happen, I had to restart my old business, Excalibur Services (UK) Ltd.

Excalibur Logo

The obvious path for me to go in the productivity and security world was Office 365 and the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility and Security portfolio.

I have been using, training and evangelising all of the products for a long, long time. I have been telling people just how easy it is to setup, deploy and use.

But the startling truth hit me this week when I was faced with buying it all and starting from scratch.

I do not have a big company (YET! Growth mind-set is key in all business) so I bought 5 seats of Office 365 E3 and 5 seats of the Enterprise Mobility and Security E3 suite as well.

I have also converted my training and testing lab into a small business data centre but that is for a different post.

Having handed back my excellent Microsoft Lumia 950 phone, I also bought a much smaller iPhone SE and a nice large 4G data plan. The next step was to set up the accounts and the policies to protect my mobile devices.

I allocated a day to do all this.

I hope my estimation skills are honed a little more when estimating work for clients. It took me less than 15 minutes to sign up for the Office 365 subscription and add Enterprise Mobility and Security licences. In addition in the same time I also set up the compliance and conditional access rules, joined my devices to Azure AD (Windows 10) and added my iOS devices to the party through the Intune Company portal.

The last job was to ensure that my conditional access and exchange activesync rules were working.